Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV); Service Quality Metrics

The present document enumerates metrics for NFV infrastructure, management and orchestration service qualities that can impact the end user service qualities delivered by VNF instances hosted on NFV infrastructure. These service quality metrics cover both direct service impairments, such as IP packets lost by NFV virtual networking which impacts end user service latency or quality of experience, and indirect service quality risks, such as NFV management and orchestration failing to continuously and rigorously enforce all anti-affinity rules which increases the risk of an infrastructure failure causing unacceptable VNF user service impact. Performance relationships exist between the metrics described in this document and in other specifications such as draft-ietf-ippm-model-based-metrics-02 (work in progress) (February 2014): "Model Based Bulk Performance Metrics", M. Mathis and A. Morton.
 
The present document does not consider:

• Units of measurement for reporting, such as whether VM premature release rates should be expressed as hourly rate (e.g. 0,0001 premature VM release events per hour), annualized rate (e.g. 0,88 premature VM release events per year), hours between events (e.g. 10 000 hour mean time between premature release events), or events per other unit of time (e.g. 100 000 FITs, meaning 100 000 premature release events in one billion hours of operation).
• Methods of Measurement which stipulate exactly how metrics will be measured.
• Rigorous counting and exclusion rules, like the precise details given in the TL 9000 Measurements Handbook TL 9000 Measurements Handbook, release 5.0, July 2012, QuestForum (http://www.tl9000.org/handbooks/measurements_handbook.html)
• Metrics that do not directly or indirectly impact VNF user service quality, like power efficiency.